Maxim and I had married almost twenty years earlier. We hadn’t rushed into having children. I was working on my dissertation, which was extremely difficult. Later we took out a mortgage for the apartment we live in now — an old two-bedroom that needed major repairs. We continued renting while slowly fixing it up, eventually moving in, though the renovations dragged on for five more years. We couldn’t do it faster — sometimes Bogdan was born, sometimes money was short, sometimes we both worked nonstop, sometimes I was defending my doctorate. Life spun us in a whirlwind of events, but we held on together, and little Bogdan gave us the strength to endure anything.